Category: Microsite: Gautam Bhatia (works)...

Circumstances conditioned my perception of the place and I began to see things in a personal and disjointed focus. The Gautam Bhatia was born very early in life. His birth in the small coastal hamlet of Ludhiana, in a government amneocentesis lab failed to elicit any response from Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru who was busy watching a hockey match on radio. The only child in a family of nine, Bhatia attended such a crowded school, that his early years were spent in relative isolation. Like all students in Indian elementary schools he spent his time studying for the GREs and making regular trips to the American consulate to check on his H-1 B visa status. His life-long ambition to own a call center or his very own STD booth was not to be. On his father's insistence, in 1947 Bhatia sat for his bar exam, and as India gained freedom, he set up his first bar in the Mehsana District of Gujarat with an ICICICI interest free loan. Because the state was dry, the business floundered and in 1942 Bhatia was forced to sell the bar on the New York Stock Exchange to an NRI. However, the experience of running a bar sparked in him an intense interest in US Constitutional Law, for which he emigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1935, along with his unborn brother and unwed wife. On the way, at Singapore Airport he met Inge Miyakawa, a Swedish stewardess of Japanese extraction. Unknown to them, the two were married in a quiet ceremony in the transit lounge, and later that very evening, at the formal reception in the Luggage Area they had a Nepalese son whom they named Louis Vuitton. In 1922 Bhatia sat for the bar exam again, but before setting up another bar, he was drawn into the Freedom Struggle by the stalwarts of the movement, Rakesh Ahuja, William Peterson, Sanjiv Cromwell, among others. The Quit India Movement was just gaining momentum at the time, and Bhatia's fiery speeches encouraged many Indians to leave the shore doing a steady butterfly stroke. Caught up in Satyagraha and the urgency of Home Rule few carried the psychological burden as effectively as him. His belief that not only English goods needed a boycott but also the London stores selling them, was a masterful stroke of genius that made him one of the more radical freedom fighters of the time. The complete boycott of Harrods and the Body Shop by the rural masses in India was one of the most significant victories of the struggle. ...